Go Google 20 Ways to Reach More Customers

GO
Google
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GO
Google
20 Ways to Reach More Customers and Build Revenue
with Google Business Tools
Greg Holden
American Management Association
New York • Atlanta • Brussels • Chicago • Mexico City • San Francisco
Shanghai • Tokyo • Toronto • Washington, D.C.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Holden, Greg.
Go Google : 20 ways to reach more customers and build revenue with Google business tools / Greg Holden.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978–0-8144–8059–5
ISBN-10: 0–8144–8059–4
1. Google. 2. Business—Computer network resources. 3. Internet marketing. 4. Internet advertising. I. Title.
HD30.37.H648 2008
658.8’72—dc22
2007043440
᭧ 2008 Greg Holden.
All rights reserved.
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Printing number
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Contents
P A R T I : Getting Ready to Go Google 1
Chapter 1 Learning from Google: A 21st-Century Model for Success 3
Chapter 2 Searching and Finding: Getting Started with Google 13
Chapter 3 Goals for Google-izing Your Business 22
P A R T I I : Using Google to Search and Be Found 33
Chapter 4 Improving Google Search Results 35
Chapter 5 Improving Your Visibility with AdWords 45
P A R T I I I : Putting Google to Work for You: Google Apps 63
Chapter 6 Collaborating with Google Apps 65
Chapter 7 Working with Docs & Spreadsheets 100
Chapter 8 Working with Google Calendar 138
Chapter 9 Gmail for Your Office 156
Chapter 10 Google Talk 176
Chapter 11 Publishing with Google Page Creator 192
Chapter 12 Boosting Your Bottom Line with AdSense 210
P A R T I V : Communications and Sales Tools 223
Chapter 13 Blogging to Improve Marketing and Customer Relations 225
Chapter 14 Gathering Business Data: News, Gadgets, and More 238
Chapter 15 Buying and Selling on Google Base 249
Chapter 16 Improving Catalog Sales 269
Chapter 17 Improving Web Site Performance with Google Analytics 283
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vi CONTENTS
Chapter 18 Organizing Your Business Files 296
Chapter 19 Organizing Your Images with Picasa 305
Chapter 20 Moving Forward: Google Apps Premium, Pack, and More 313
Appendix A 325
Appendix B 331
Appendix C 335
Index 339
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GO
Google
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PAGE viii

P A R T
ⅷI
Getting Ready to Go Google
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C H A P T E R ⅷ1
Learning from Google:
A 21st-Century Model for
Success
You know what Google is. At least, you think you know Google. Chances are you
associate Google with being among the most successful high-tech businesses in the
world, as well as being the most popular search service on the World Wide Web. And
you have probably heard ‘‘google’’ used as a verb, meaning ‘‘to search for or find
something online,’’ as in: ‘‘I Googled my professor and found his home page . . . I
Gmailed him my report.’’ (Gmail is Google’s email service; you’ll hear quite a bit
about it in the pages that follow.) If that’s all you think of when you hear the word
‘‘Google,’’ you’re missing the latest Internet revolution. What you can learn from this
book will improve your life immeasurably, especially if your goals are to work more
efficiently and to do a better job of marketing yourself or your company.
What’s So Great About Google?
Back in 1996, two graduate students started their own Web-based search service,
which they called BackRub. By 1998, the project had gained a lot of attention, se-
cured some investors, and turned into a corporation called Google—a Web site that
made specific Web pages, discussion groups, or even individual words and phrases
easy to locate. In recent years, Google has expanded its services for businesses in a
dramatic way. Its Gmail and AdWords services are now in widespread use. For exam-
ple, Google offers scheduling, word processing, spreadsheet, email, and other applica-
tions both separately and as part of an umbrella package called Google Apps. These
days, Google is also an increasingly popular solution for small businesses that need
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4 GETTING READY TO GO GOOGLE
to increase their visibility and build their brand. Google is fast becoming the most
affordable and effective marketing venue for businesses.
Through its expansion into the business services space, Google itself provides you
with a role model that you can follow as you develop your own business online. It all
starts when you create a service that gives you a solid foundation. After a steady
stream of customers are knocking at your virtual door, you can expand into new
areas. Google can help you make that exciting move.
This book will give you comprehensive descriptions of the site’s search engine,
advertising, marketing, workflow, and communications features. Not only that, but
you’ll be provided with tips on how they can best meet your needs. Google’s search
tool and other services can help businesses get organized and on the same page,
often for little or no cost. The new Google Apps will let businesses take their online
communications and data sharing to a new level. This book will examine ways in
which businesses like yours can communicate messages and make Web sites more
visible to prospective customers; it will go a step beyond what has previously been
said about Google to describe how clients and coworkers can use it to communicate
with one another more effectively.
These days, Google is much more than a directory of the Web’s contents. It’s on
the verge of becoming an integral part of many small business operations. Google is
itself a model for a 21st-century business. You can learn a great deal about how a
successful company operates by reading the sections that follow.
ⅷ
Googling Google: Researching an Internet Success Story
Plenty of books have written about Google and how it started. In a nutshell, the
business was founded by two men, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who first met in late
1995 when they were graduate students at the University of Michigan. They spent a
lot of time and programming effort to come up with a complex algorithm for finding
content on the Web with amazing accuracy.
It should come as no surprise that the best way to find out about Google is to
Google the company history yourself. If you enter the search terms Google History on
the home page (http://www.google.com), you will see that the first returned result is
a link to Google Corporate Information: Google Milestones (http://www.google.com/
corporate/history.html). This will reveal a comprehensive and up-to-date timeline de-
tailing the company’s achievements. Here you will find personal anecdotes from and
biographies of Larry and Sergey (who are shown below), as well as a detailed history
of their company’s humble beginnings and remarkable growth. Don’t be afraid of being
bored. You won’t be. It’s all told with the straightforward and laid-back style that have
become synonymous with the name Google.
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5LEARNING FROM GOOGLE: A 21ST-CENTURY MODEL FOR SUCCESS
For more information, you can also scroll down to the bottom of any page on the
Google website and click on the link labeled About Google (http://www.google.com/
about.html). This will take you to a map of all of the products, services, and support
features that Google offers, as well as provide links to more corporate information.
The ‘‘take away’’ point here is that Google succeeds by providing a service that
everyone wants and needs: access to information and links to virtually any kind of
online content.
Information Sells
What’s the first lesson you learn from Google’s story? Having identified a need that
is shared by each one of the millions of individuals who go online every day, Brin
and Page stuck to their core business and kept improving it. They spent many years
building their company, slowly focusing on the basic activity of searching for content
on the Web. Only when that process became widely accepted did they begin to sell
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ads that would appear alongside search results pages. Only after several years did the
company go public. Only recently have they begun to provide the business applica-
tions described in this book.
When you start up your own Web site, whether or not you use Google, you need
to identify your mission and stick to it without trying to take on too much at once.
Define the kinds of customers, clients, or visitors you want to reach. Determine how
you’re going to meet their needs by making your own products or services available
online. Start with a few pages or business applications and build your presence gradu-
ally. Once you have a firm base—a Web site created with Google’s Web Page Creator
(see Chapter 11), a domain name obtained through Google Apps (Chapter 6), or a
sales channel created with Google Base (Chapter 15)—you can expand your presence
to build a wider audience.
On the Internet, the more prospective customers who can reach and the richer
the level of content you provide, the more effective your business will be. As you’ll
learn in subsequent chapters, you improve your search engine rankings for both ven-
ues when you are able to make links from one Web site you own to another one you
own. If your sites have three or four ‘‘levels’’ of content (in other words, if your
visitors are able to click through from one page to another and keep finding new
forms of information) your site will be ‘‘stickier.’’ You’ll be able to hold those visitors
on your site for a longer period of time, which makes it that much more likely they’ll
perform the action you are hoping for—whether that action is making a purchase,
filling out a form, or sending you an email inquiry.
Google gives you a virtual toolbox full of options for creating a Web presence
that is expansive and extensive. It can help you in one of two ways:
• If you already have a Web site dedicated to your business or club (or to your
own personal exploits), Google provides you with a set of tools that are sure-
fire ways to help you meet your goals. (And you can use Google’s Page Cre-
ator as described in Chapter 11 to create another Web site, too.)
• Google gives you a free and yet powerful way to establish a full-fledged Web
presence if you don’t have one already.
Keep It Simple
When you look at the Google home page shown in Figure 1-1, what do you see?
Along with the search box and heading and links, your eyes will rest on lots of white
space. While other Web sites (such as that of Google’s competitor Yahoo!) are clut-
tered with links, words, images, and corporate logos, Google’s remains remarkably
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Figure 1-1. Google’s home page points to a model of simplicity you should try to emulate.
uncluttered. No doubt Google could make millions by placing a single ad or two on
its well-traveled home page. But the site’s managers know the value of simplicity, and
you should appreciate it too.
There’s no doubt about it: You can go ahead and hire Web designers and com-
puter programmers to create a complex and world-class Web site that will ‘‘Wow!’’
everyone who visits it. But chances are you have picked up this book because you
want to avoid just this sort of expense and complication. You want to be in control
and plan your online site in a way that reflects your personality and your interests.
And you don’t want to pay an arm and a leg—or, unless you sign up for the premium
Google Apps service that is aimed at businesses, anything at all. You want to ‘‘Go
Google,’’ in other words.
Focus on Your Core Business
Even as it expands to the desktops of individual business users, Google hasn’t lost
sight of its core business: providing accurate search results. Google doesn’t make
money off the search results by themselves. However, its paid advertising programs
such as AdWords, which place ads alongside search results, have proven to be highly
lucrative. Google has found a way to preserve its original mission and maintain the
quality of its product for the millions who search the Internet each day. At the same
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time, it enables customers to take advantage of that product by providing advertising
in a targeted way. This system is based on making a decision on how much they will
pay each time a visitor clicks on one of their ads.
The lesson for you is to focus on your own core business and establish a base of
operations on the Web first. Then you can begin to think about branching out into
trying to boost productivity as well as revenue. Suppose you are starting from square
one: you have a Big Idea for an online business and you have identified the target
audience you want to reach. But that’s as far as you’ve gone so far. You have Internet
access through your office, your school, or your home. But you need to set up your
own business online. If you only wanted one service to get you started, the logical
first choice would be to sign up for email with Google’s Gmail service—email, after
all, is central to all online communications. But if you want a complete solution, sign
up for Google Apps and look around at other Google services.
Table 1-1 presents you with a road map for Google services that can help you
take your first step online: establishing a Web site, email, and a domain. That’s all
you need to do to make you or your company visible online.
Once you have a Web presence, you can follow Google’s example and start to
branch out. Google can help your company’s internal operations by improving collab-
oration and workflow among your employees. You can create shared business docu-
ments, set up user accounts, and schedule meetings. The Google offerings listed in
Table 1-2 are relatively new and exciting in many ways. That’s why they have the
potential to take business away from Microsoft, to mention just one example of other
companies that develop expensive business applications.
Table 1-1. Step One: Tools for Establishing an Online Presence
What You Need How to Get It Where to Find It
Gmail only Sign up http://mail.google.com
A Web domain, Gmail, Sign up for Google Apps and http://www.google.com/a
Google Calendar, Web Page buy a domain name for
Creator, Google Talk, Docs & $10/year
Spreadsheets
Get out news and updates to Create a blog with Blogger http://www.blogger.com
your customers quickly and
frequently
Make your business’s Add your business to Google
physical location easier to Maps
find
Make your Web site more Add Google Gadgets
content-rich and timely
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Table 1-2. Tools for Working More Efficiently
What You Need How to Get It Where to Find It
Save money on long distance Sign up for Google Talk
phone calls by typing or
conducting voice chat
sessions
Creating group discussions Start your own Google http://groups.google.com
Group
Set appointments, plan Use Google Calendar http://calendar.google.com
meetings, and share your (also part of Google Apps)
upcoming schedule
Set up a Google search Obtain Google Desktop
engine on your own computer
to search through your own
files or other computers on
the same network
Translating Web pages and Translate with Google
text in a foreign language Toolbar
Get the latest business Google Trends
statistics and trends
Organize your electronic Use Google’s Picasa service
image files
ⅷBritish company uses Google to Collaborate
Rock Kitchen Harris (http://www.rkh.co.uk) is an advertising, design, PR, and web
agency based in Leicester, England. There are eighteen employees working in the same
office but, as in any organization, staff people frequently need to work from home or
go on the road. The solution that has worked best for this company is to use Gmail to
keep in touch and Google Apps to share files.
‘‘Google Apps has been particularly helpful in allowing some of us to work from
home and all of us to check our email and schedules wherever we may be,’’ says Paul
Sculthorpe, Senior Web Developer for the company. Sculthorpe says that aside from
giving everyone on staff the ability to schedule upcoming meetings with Calendar and
share files, it’s made his job easier, too. ‘‘It has taken a big load off our general IT
administration staff. Now we can focus on our real work. The calendar and docs sharing
is particularly good.’’
Email is the primary Google service used by the company. ‘‘All of our emails are
stored at Google. We figure their systems are more resilient and secure than our own
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shoddy solution that failed a few months back. Those using desktop clients still down-
load all of their emails too.’’ A desktop client is a program like Outlook Express that is
installed on your computer and that gathers information from a networked re-
source—in this case, an e-mail server. Google’s Gmail service provides an alternative
for those who want to take advantage of it.
Although Google’s Docs & Spreadsheets service, which enables a company to pre-
pare, edit, and share word processing and spreadsheet ﬁles online, isn’t as full-
featured as, say, Microsoft Word or Excel, as Sculthorpe observes: ‘‘for simple day to
day stuff that needs collaboration, it’s ideal.’’
Google can also help a business market itself and sell products and services on-
line. In this arena, Google is challenging e-commerce hosts like Microsoft and Yahoo!
and even the popular marketplace eBay.
Twenty Google Tools for Boosting Your Productivity
Google has extended far beyond its core search business to provide a variety of new
services, including free email, Web hosting, and business applications. It only makes
sense to pay attention to what Google has to offer and take advantage of the services
that can help you. Go Google does not attempt to be a comprehensive examination
of all of Google’s online services. For one problem, a book like that would be far too
large to fit on your bookshelf. But more importantly, the book would become obso-
lete between the time it is written and when it is delivered from the printer. That’s
because Google is constantly expanding its services and acquiring new technologies.
There is also the important matter of your time and energy. The truth is that if
you look through all of the services and utilities made available by Google (a list that
seems to grow all the time), you’ll find many more than 20 tools. But in a manner of
speaking, we’ve done a significant portion of your work for you. Rather than trying
to cover everything comprehensively, this book has chosen 20 services to describe in
detail. Learning to make the most of what these services have to offer can make a
difference to anyone wanting to get a new online business off the ground or improve
the reach and success level of an existing small- to medium-size company. Here is a
list of 20 of the tools you’re likely to find most useful and that are described in this
book’s subsequent chapters:
1. Google’s search service. Google indexes and organizes the contents of the Web
in a huge database; it’s this database that you use to search the Web (see
Chapter 2).
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2. AdWords. This is a paid search placement program; you create ads and bid
on how much you’ll pay for each click the ad attracts. Each time someone
clicks on your ad, you gain a potential customer or client (see Chapter 5).
3. AdSense. This program enables blog and Web site owners to run targeted ads
alongside their content; the content of the ads is intended to complement
what you’ve published yourself (see Chapter 12).
4. Google Apps. This service provides you with a domain name (for a one-time
$10 fee) and enables you to use a suite of business applications, which multi-
ple users can access (see Chapter 6).
5. Google Docs & Spreadsheets. This exciting and easy-to-use service gives you a
word processor and a spreadsheet application that you can use and access
for free (see Chapter 7).
6. Google Calendar. A default calendar is created for you when you sign up for
Google Apps; you can also create custom calendars and even embed calen-
dars in Web pages (see Chapter 8).
7. Gmail. Google’s e-mail application comes with lots of storage space and an
integrated chat client to boot (see Chapter 9).
8. Google Talk. Google’s chat application lets you send instant messages and
even conduct real-time voice conversations through your computer (see
Chapter 10).
9. Google Page Creator. This Web page editing tool lets you create your own
Web site to go along with your Google Apps domain name (see Chapter 11).
10. Blogger. Google’s popular, and free, blogging services lets you create your
own Web-based diary, complete with an index, an archive, and a comments
feature (see Chapter 13).
11. Checkout, Google Product Search, Catalogs. I’m fudging a bit and lumping
these three separate Google services into a single unit. Each one can help
commercial businesses sell products online (see Chapter 16).
12. Google Base. A growing number of entrepreneurs are posting merchandise,
property, services, jobs, and lots of other things for sale in this Web publish-
ing area (see Chapter 15).
13. Google Gadgets. These easy-to-implement bits of Web content can make your
Web site more valuable and attract more repeat visits (see Chapter 16).
14. Analytics, Trends. These two analytical tools provide you with information
about visits to your own Web site and trends in Web searches, respectively
(see Chapter 17).
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15. Desktop, Toolbar. These two tools help you search more effectively, both
through files on your own computer and your local network (Desktop) as
well as the wider Internet (Toolbar). See Chapter 18 for more.
16. Picasa. This powerful photo viewing and editing tool automatically organizes
all the files on your desktop and lets you edit them as well (see Chapter 19).
17. News, Book Search. These tools provide businesspeople with important up-to-
the-minute data they need to keep on top of trends and events (see Chapter
19).
18. Google Apps Premium. This corporate version of Google Apps guarantees
nearly 24/7 reliability and gives businesses the ability to write custom pro-
grams that interface with Google’s services (see Chapter 20).
19. Gmail Mobile and SMS. These tools let busy professionals search Google and
exchange messages when they’re on the road (see Chapter 19).
20. Google Pack. This suite of applications will boost the functionality of virtually
any workstation (see Chapter 20).
Go Google!
In this chapter, you hopefully expanded your vision of what Google has to offer.
Rather than just a single page where you enter a search query and get back a page of
results, Google is a business resource. Its shared applications, email, and other tools
can help small businesses work more efficiently; their marketing and advertising tools
can help companies that are strapped for advertising cash improve their visibility,
too. In the chapters to come, you’ll learn how to take full advantage of Google’s
cutting-edge tools for working online. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Google’s
shared applications have the potential to change the way the world works. The end
result is likely to take business away from well-established software vendors like Mi-
crosoft, as well as from prominent Web services providers like Yahoo!. It’s all about
options: you no longer need to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on expensive
productivity programs. You now have the option to Go Google—explore the resources
described throughout this book, and you’ll be glad you did!
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C H A P T E R ⅷ2
Searching and Finding: Getting
Started with Google
Everyone you ask about Google has the same response, ‘‘It’s that Web page where
you search for something.’’ Google’s search service is its core business. It’s also the
activity that allows many of its other services to work so well. The huge database of
Web page contents compiled by Google and used to present its search results is also
used to search your own page and present you with AdSense ads that are relevant to
your particular content. AdWords ads work because they are placed next to Google
search results. And specialty search services like Google Product Search make use of
the same technology.
If you want to know how Google works, you need to understand the searching
and indexing processes that are at its core. In this chapter, you’ll get a brief overview
of what makes Google search ‘‘tick.’’ Lots of other books describe Google’s search
capabilities, so we’ll spare you the details here. (It’s not possible to reveal too much
on this topic anyhow, because Google keeps its precise searching and ranking tech-
nologies a closely guarded secret.) What is of real interest to you at this point is
learning how to take the first step in integrating Google’s business services into your
own operation: signing up for a Google Account.
Googling the Web: What Makes Google So Successful
As you can tell from the title of this section, Google, like Frisbee and Kleenex, has
become a household name. Web surfers everywhere use the word ‘‘Google’’ to de-
scribe the act of searching for something, many times not even realizing (or caring)
that there is a powerful company that shares the same name. That works both ways,
too; businesses both large and small hope they will be ‘‘Googled’’ by those same
consumers, who will go on to find out more about what they have to offer and
eventually make a purchase.
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The place to start with Google is to determine how it can help your site become
more visible on the Web. And the way to understand that is to understand how the
Google search works. Here’s an overview to give you the gist of it.
1. Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, came up with formulas for
indexing the contents of Web pages, storing them in a huge database, and
retrieving pages based on keyword searches.
2. Google uses automated programs to scour the contents of Web pages on a
regular basis (just how frequently is one of those trade secrets I already men-
tioned). The programs record the contents of many pages and the URLs and
store them in a database.
3. You, the end user, type a word or phrase like ‘‘Irish dancing’’ into Google’s
search box and click the search button. When you do this, a program is acti-
vated on Google’s servers. The program searches the pages that have already
been stored in the database. That’s right: when you click the search button on
Google’s home page or in the Google Toolbar, you are searching Google’s
database of Web pages, not the ‘‘live’’ Web itself.
4. Google compiles a set of search results ranked in the order of highest rele-
vance to your search. It’s Google’s system of page ranking—of determining
which items are on the top on the first page of the results—that’s as notable as
anything in this system.
As an end user, you already know how the search system works: it helps you find
Web pages that contain information you’re looking for. But ‘‘Going Google’’ means
you want to make use of the system from the standpoint of someone who wants to
do better business. You can take advantage of the system of keyword searches and
page rankings to achieve the business objectives outlined in the sections that follow.
Objective 1: Making Your Business Easier to Find
One way you can manipulate Google’s search system is to make your online business
more visible. For many businesses, the primary goal is to be ranked higher than the
other entries in a search for a given set of keywords. For example, my brother Mike
has gone to great pains to improve his search engine ranking for his Web site Lp2CD-
Solutions, in which he restores old vinyl LP records and converts them to CD format.
There are a number of competitors in this field, and a search for the phrase term ‘‘LP
to CD restoration’’ finds his site (http://www.lp2cdsolutions.com) second from the
top of the first page (see Figure 2-1). And as he will tell you, once you end up on the
first page of a set of Google results you get far more visits. That results in more
inquiries from interested parties and, ultimately, more sales.
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15SEARCHING AND FINDING: GETTING STARTED WITH GOOGLE
Figure 2-1. You can leverage Google’s database to improve your Web site’s visibility.
Objective 2: Working Smarter
Knowledge of up-to-the-minute business trends and news is important for anyone
who needs to make business decisions. By searching Google’s many specialty search
sites, such as its News area, you can look up critical facts and figures and back up
your business reports. Not only that, but by scouring Google Trends, which presents
reports based on recent searches of Google’s storehouse of information, you get an
idea of what shoppers are interested in online.
Objective 3: Improving Your Web Presentation
You can create your own Web site with Google, and you’ll find out how to use its
Page Creator service in Chapter 11. The Warehouse Department of Paper Mart, a
family-owned packaging store in Los Angeles, was able to create a simple Web page
and link it to the company’s main Web site. The page describes any job openings in
the department—or, in the case of the page shown in Figure 2-2, the fact that there
are no job openings.
The Web pages you create will get more attention if your site contains useful and
timely content. The information sources mentioned in the preceding section can help
you with the content in the main body of your Web page. You can enhance your page
content by adding ‘‘gadgets’’ such as a display of the current date and time or a
miniature search box to your site so your visitors can search Google, for example.
You can add the current time and weather, as well as maps. You can even add a
calendar showing upcoming events related to your company or your interests.
Objective 4: Advertising Your Business
When you understand how keywords and good writing can help your Web site gain
better exposure on Google search results, you can use the same system to write ads
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Figure 2-2. Page Creator helps you create a simple yet effective business Web site.
that gain more attention for your business on Google AdWords. AdWords is a suc-
cessful program for delivering targeted cost-per-click ads alongside Google search
results. By including critical keywords in your ads and placing bids on each one, you
can increase the chances that your ad will appear in a prominent position—again,
near the top of the first search results page. That is the best way to get visitors who
are looking for what you have to sell to click on them and check out what you have
to offer. Find out more about AdWords in Chapter 5.
Selling Your Products or Services
You probably don’t realize it, but some of Google’s online services provide you with
channels where you can list tangible consumer goods or professional services you
want to sell to the public. Google Base gives you a way to list items for sale in a
classified ad format much like the popular Craigslist sites provide. You can also create
a file of your catalog sales descriptions and submit them to Google’s Product Search
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search service for retail goods. You can even send electronic versions of your printed
sales catalogs to Google Catalogs so that shoppers can ‘‘flip’’ through the pages using
their Web browsers, clicking through to your Web site if they want to complete a
purchase. You’ll find out more about such services in Chapters 14 and 15.
Getting the Word Out
Every business wants to stand out from the crowd, and all those who offer a service
want to share their expertise with interested readers. Google gives writers, publishers,
and marketers alike a range of forums where they can get their expertise and their
experience before the general public. By posting a blog on Google’s Blogger service
(http://www.blogger.com), you gain the ability to get your words online instantly and
to update them on a regular basis. You can also post sales descriptions, recipes,
instruction manuals, and reams of customer service information to Google Base
(http://base.google.com). Not only do you get published, but also your words are
indexed and included in Google’s search databases so people can find them more
easily. (See Chapter 13 for more details about Blogger, and Chapter 15 for Google
Base.)
Google offers many more services to businesses; the ones mentioned in this part
of the chapter are those that make use of Google’s search methodology and its seem-
ingly limitless database of Web pages. No matter which Google service you choose,
you need to start the same way: signing up for an account with Google will enable
you to use any of its services.
Obtaining a Google Account
Before you can sign up for any Google service, from Gmail to Google Apps, you
need to obtain a Google Account: a username and password you’ll use to log onto
the site. If you only use Google as a consumer of information—for search, for finding
news stories, for reading newsgroup messages—you don’t need an account. But if you
want to take advantage of any of the business services, you need to sign in.
Google Accounts start out simple, but things get more complicated as you sign
up for more services and move onto the suite of applications called Google Apps. If
you prepare accounts for your colleagues so they can share a calendar and other files
with you—and that’s the whole point of Google Apps—you’ve suddenly got a whole
handful of e-mail addresses and passwords to maintain. There are a few general prin-
ciples you need to keep in mind:
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• If you sign up only for Gmail, your e-mail address is your account username.
You have a single username and password.
• If you sign up for Google Apps, you have to obtain a domain name. You get
an e-mail address that is part of that domain name: for instance, I have the
domain literarymidwest.com, and the e-mail address is greg@literarymidwest
.com. However, greg@literarymidwest.com is not the username for my Google
Apps account: that is gregholden57@gmail.com. It’s another example of the
multiple e-mail addresses you might have to maintain when you start using
multiple Google services.
• Beware of being logged into several services at once so that multiple windows
are open. That can cause Google to get confused. If you’re logged in with one
username with one service and you try to sign in with another username to
access another service with the same computer, you might be prevented from
doing so. You need to sign out of one account before signing in to another.
Note: You don’t need to proliferate Google Accounts if you sign up for,
say, Google Apps, Google Base, AdWords, AdSense, and so on. In theory,
you can use the same username and password for all these services. But
if you sign up at different times or if someone in your office signs up for
one service and you sign up for another, it is possible to end up with two
or more accounts for the same thing. This isn’t a problem unless you mix
up or forget your passwords, as I am prone to do occasionally.
Your username, in fact, will take the form of your e-mail address when you start using
Gmail or another Google business service. So give some thought to the account name
you’ll choose: if you plan to use Google Apps for business purposes, you want your
account name to look businesslike rather than ‘‘playful’’ or mischievous. Don’t
choose a username like Deedlebop, which might result in an inappropriate name
like deedlebop@consolidated-industry.com. For personal use, deedlebop@gmail.com
would be fine. But I recommend that you use your own first and last name if you set
up a Google domain for your business. If your name is Lucy Evans, your username
would be lucy.evans. This would give you the e-mail address like lucy.evans@consoli-
dated-industry.com.
While you can set up your Google account using a pre-existing email address, and
then set up a Gmail address later, you can also take a ‘‘shortcut’’ by setting up a
Gmail account first. This will automatically create a Google account for you, and it
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allows you to sidestep the process of creating both separately. Since I personally feel
that simply creating a Gmail account is the most logical course of action, assuming
you ever plan on having one at any point in the future, I’ll list the instructions for
this option first.
Follow these steps to obtain a Google Account and sign up for Gmail:
1. Go to the Gmail home page (http://mail.google.com).
2. Click the Sign up for Gmail link, which appears in the blue box below the
blank fields for entering Email and Password.
3. Type your first and last names in the Firstname and Lastname fields.
Note that it doesn’t need to be your real name on your ID card; Google isn’t
going to check it.
4. In the box next to Desired Login Name, type a simple, easy to remember word
that will serve as the first part of your Google Mail (Gmail) address. This is
the part of the address that will appear before gmail.com. If you use two
words, you may want to follow the common convention of separating them by
a dot (.) or the hyphen character. (Following this convention makes it clear
to visitors exactly what your first and last names are.) Click the check availabil-
ity button to see if the name you want is available; if not, try a different name
or choose one of the options Google suggests. Remember that suggestive or
funny names might give you a chuckle now but could be a problem later on if
you use them to apply for a job, or to correspond with your college professor
or supervisor, for instance.
5. Fill in the rest of the page, and click the I accept. Create my account button at
the bottom of the page.
Be sure to choose a strong password as described in the sidebar below.
One of the most important ﬁelds you can ﬁll out in this form is one
that is easy to ignore: Secondary email. I urge you to enter a valid e-mail
address here. Having lost my own password, I can tell you that having
a secondary e-mail address recorded with your account information is
important: Google uses the address to send you password reset infor-
mation.
6. An email verification page appears stating that a mail message has been sent
to the e-mail address you entered at the top of the registration form. When the
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message arrives, click the link included in the message to verify your ac-
count—if everything works correctly you should go to your new account.
Once your account is verified, you should now be able to sign into your account
at the Google Home Page (http://www.google.com), or at the Gmail page, (http://
mail.google.com).
ⅷChoosing Passwords that Pass the Test
Passwords are always important. But with a Web site such as Google that provides
business applications, choosing a strong password is even more critical. You’re trusting
Google to keep your e-mail secure. If you store shared text or financial_files online
through Google’s Docs and & Spreadsheets application (see Chapter 7), you obviously
need to protect those files. If they contain personal information, identity theft be-
comes a real concern for individuals who do business with you. Choose a password
that:
• Is not a recognizable word in the dictionary
• Contains a mixture of characters, numerals, and possibly punctuation marks
• Mixes both capital and lowercase letters
• Does not contain a birthday, address, or other recognizable number—and espe-
cially not your social security number.
• Has six or more characters: Six to eight characters is good because it is easy to
remember.
• Is something that will stick in your mind, such as an acronym. You can turn the
phrase Google Is My Business Applications Host into gImbAh. If you then add a
number, it becomes gImbAh29, for instance.
Google’s security measures can be undone not only by a weak password but also
by bad password management. Never write your password on a piece of paper that
could be lost. What’s even worse is keeping your password near your computer,
especially taping it to your monitor. Never give your password out to someone who
could misuse it. Do everything you can to guard your password so no one can gain
access to your information without your knowledge or approval.
Once you have a Gmail e-mail address, you can use it to sign up for another
service, such as Google Talk. Here’s how to sign up for a Google Account using a
pre-existing email address:
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1. Go to the Google Home Page (http://www.google.com).
2. Click the Sign in link at the top right hand corner of the page.
3. When the page refreshes and the blue login box appears, click the Create an
account now link. The Create an Account page appears.
4. Type your current e-mail address in the box required: this can be a Gmail
address or another Google address, such as one you assign yourself if you have
Google Apps.
Entering your Gmail address is a good option because you need to type
a valid e-mail address—one that you can check easily, as opposed to an
expired e-mail address or one you don’t have access to for some reason.
If you are using Google for your ofﬁce and you want the new service to
be connected to other business services you have previously obtained
from Google, sign in with your Google Apps e-mail and password.
5. Fill in the rest of the fields on the page, read the Terms of Service, and click
the button at the bottom of the page.
6. In some cases you can start using your service when you gain access to its
home page—the Google Apps home page, for instance. In other cases you’ll
need to check your e-mail for a message from Google welcoming you to the
new service. The message contains a link you’ll need to click in order to com-
plete the signup process and start using the service. You can now log into your
account at the Google home page or the home page of the service you want
to set up.
In this chapter, you examined the core activity that makes most, if not all, of Google’s
other services possible—its system for searching and indexing contents of networked
documents, and of ranking relevant pages in response to a keyword search. You
learned how that system can help you take advantage of Google’s business applica-
tions. You also took the first step in Going Google—signing up for Gmail and obtain-
ing a Google Account. In the next chapter, you’ll start to establish goals and
objectives for running your business with Google so you can take advantage of the
features mentioned in this chapter.
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C H A P T E R
ⅷ3
Goals for Google-izing
Your Business
If you’re a small business owner or manager, you’re used to setting goals and drawing
up plans to achieve them. It makes sense to do the same with Google. How do you
decide which Google services to choose? People considering this question usually
begin by going to the More Google Products page (http://www.google.com/intl/en/
options) and scanning the long list of available services. That way, you can pick the
ones that seem useful to you on an a la carte basis. You don’t necessarily give a lot
of thought to your business objectives for doing so. The fact is that a little advance
planning can make your effort to incorporate Google into your business activities
much more effective and goal-oriented.
One direction small businesses should consider taking is to sign up for a suite of
applications called Google Apps. It’s hard to overestimate the potential impact of
this suite of productivity applications. For years, businesses have had to throw around
terms like intranets, extranets, application servers, and hosted applications, all of which
cost thousands of dollars to install, configure, and maintain. Google Apps makes all
of these functions available for free. Even if you sign up for the Premium version of
Google Apps (described in Chapter 18), the $50 per-user annual fee is far less than
you’d have to pay to install a comparable program, Microsoft Exchange, for instance.
But Google Apps won’t do it all. And Google definitely contains many more
services that will help you work more efficiently. Now I’m saying it’s more effective.
But is it really? When you tell your boss or your staff (or even yourself!) that you
want to keep your spreadsheets and word processing files on Google and publish
your catalogs there, they might be surprised. But by touting some of the business
objectives you can achieve with Google’s many services that are described in this
chapter, you’ll be able to make a good business argument.
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22
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23GOALS FOR GOOGLE-IZING YOUR BUSINESS
Improving Your Visibility
For most online businesses, simply being found is half the battle. Google is the new-
est and best known single online resource for businesses around. It’s the equivalent
of running a Super Bowl ad, renting a billboard along a major highway, or putting
your corporate name on a baseball stadium. When consumers hear the name Google,
they remember that it’s a place to find information. When businesspeople with Web
sites think of Google, at some point they inevitably ask themselves: How can I get
better placement on Google? By that they mean that they want their site to appear
higher up in search results. I go into this subject in more detail in Chapter 4.
Increasing Your Advertising Revenue
Some businesses go on the Web with the goal of generating extra income through
advertising. By creating a Web site that gets a high number of ‘‘hits’’ (that’s Web-
speak for visits), they are able to attract advertisers who will pay them to display ads
on their pages. But things get complicated when you—the busy Web site owner and
businessperson—have to negotiate who will place the ads, where they will appear,
what size and format will be used, and how you’ll get paid. Google handles that for
you through its AdSense program—and at the same time, ensures that the ads you
display will complement your own content. You’ll find out more in Chapter 12.
Collaborating More Effectively
In today’s global economy, many companies have branch offices around the world
or contractors who work from far-flung locations. Getting everyone in the same place
for staff meetings can be costly when it comes to the time spent traveling and money
spent on transportation costs. Establishing a business presence with Gmail, Google
Apps, and Google Page Creator gives employees a way to keep in touch and share
files, no matter where they are physically located. A Google Apps site gives col-
leagues a place to access word processing and spreadsheet documents.
Collaboration is also fostered not only by having a virtual workspace online,
courtesy of Google, but by having a single way to access Google’s e-mail, spreadsheet,
word processing, and other business applications: a Web browser. Once you are able
to do all of your work—including e-mail—with your browser, you can work from any-
where. It doesn’t matter whether you are using a Macintosh or Windows computer,
whether you have Microsoft Office installed, or if you have Office, whether you use
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Office 2003 or 2007. Your Web browser lets you get the work done. Some of the
benefits of the Google-ized collaboration model are described below.
ⅷBehind the Scenes: The Client-Server System
You’ll get a better understanding of Google Apps—and all of Google’s online services,
in fact—if you think of the client-server system. Imagine that Google is the server, and
you and your individual Web browser are the client, which connects to Google to get
information or perform functions like sending and receiving e-mail or reading news
headlines.
The whole Internet, in fact, is built around the client-server system. The net-
worked information made available on the Web is on computers that are connected to
the Net and that are designed to serve files or applications; neither you nor your
office must be connected all the time to exchange messages and files. (It’s great if
your office has a high-speed connection called a T-1 or T-3 line; it’s just not manda-
tory.)
For example, if you are working outside the office, both you and the company can
communicate by sending e-mail messages or files to a central server that is always
available, such as the mail server or Web server operated by your Internet provider or
your service provider (in this case, Google). An e-mail message you send to someone
in your office is stored on the server until that individual connects from a coffee shop
or library and retrieves the message later. You can also upload a file to your Docs &
Spreadsheets (D & S) space on Google’s server. Someone in the office can connect to
the same D & S site and download the file at their convenience.
The client-server system is always present on the Web. Normally when you are on
the Internet you access a Web page stored on someone else’s Web server with your
client program, your browser. In the case of Google Apps, your client browser can now
access your pages, files, spreadsheets, and other records that you have stored on
Google’s application servers.
Streamlining Communications
Using Google as a central communications point helps you connect more efficiently
with coworkers and business colleagues. You can exchange e-mail, communicate in
real time using chat or conferencing software, or post messages on company bulletin
boards. Your Google Start Page (see Chapter 12) gives you and your coworkers a
single point of access to both your company’s business data and to fellow employees.
So rather than having to e-mail files to one another or be physically present in the
office so you can log into the company’s file server, you can browse to Google and
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log in from your hotel room. You can then post your files online through Docs &
Spreadsheets and even discuss them while you’re viewing them by typing instant
messages to one another. In the early days of the Web, there was much talk about
intranets—internal networks that used Web technologies to share data within work-
group members. Google’s services point toward a new and more efficient way of
communicating. Being able to store data not on your own servers but on Google’s
saves you the expense, maintenance, and need to upgrade the necessary machines in-
house. It’s also very helpful to be able to use Google’s e-mail and chat clients to share
information if you already have one of the applications open and want to send a file
to the person with whom you’re communicating; you don’t have to connect to Google
Apps and move the file to your shared space, but can send it immediately from within
the application you’re using.
Increasing Your Mobility
Connecting to the Internet in general, and to Google in particular, enlarges your
world. That applies to the world of work, too. When your office is online, you don’t
have to physically be on the premises to exchange messages, share files, and compare
schedules with your coworkers. With a computer and modem at home or on the
road, you can communicate with the home office by e-mail, fax from your computer,
FTP, chat, or a number of other alternatives. Google gives you an even greater level
of freedom: you don’t have to worry about whether you use a Mac or a PC, whether
you use Fetch or Cute FTP for file transfers, or Thunderbird or Outlook Express for
e-mail. By using Google, you get a uniform interface to information. And it’s free:
you don’t have to pay a monthly fee to an Internet Service Provider for e-mail service.
As long as you can get access to the Net at school, at work, in a public library, or
other location, you can access your free Google e-mail and file sharing services.
But moving some of your business communications online with Google gives you
a new set of options that go beyond simple e-mail messages. For example, one trend
in the American workforce is the increased use of ‘‘contingent workers’’—temps, part-
timers, and freelancers. By collaborating through Google, it is possible to make as-
signments to subcontractors and with employees who work out of their homes or
other offices. Using Gmail, Talk, or other applications, you can exchange schedules,
transfer files, and work on projects collaboratively. It’s faster and cheaper than long-
distance phone calls or courier services.
It’s all about being open to adopting new business strategies. When employees
have new ways to communicate, their entire way of doing business shifts. E-mail
conversations that go on for days and that are spread out over one’s crowded email
inbox can be complicated and difficult to track. With Gmail, your conversations are
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grouped together so that the back-and-forth with a particular individual can be viewed
in one place, for instance. If you are in a hurry and the correspondent is online, you
can open a chat window and ‘‘talk’’ to that person immediately by typing messages,
without incurring long-distance phone charges. Forums like Google Groups help fos-
ter a many-to-many community atmosphere, which has promoted customer loyalty,
expanded the outreach of companies to new global markets, and increased produc-
tivity.
Tip: Instead of working in isolation, employees should ideally share
data and collaborate as colleagues. Your want to make sure the dif-
ferent parts of your company will talk to one another and work to-
gether. Resistance will cause your efforts to integrate the Internet
into your daily business operations to fall short of expectations.
If you and your business colleagues who work in different locations need to share
images in order to develop projects or do collaborative problem-solving, the Internet
gives you a variety of options. You don’t have to use expensive conferencing centers
or set up leased lines in order to conduct virtual meetings. You can share your images
with Picasa. When you use conferencing software such as Google Talk to literally
talk with your own voice through a microphone and headphones connected to your
computer, you no longer have to make expensive long-distance phone calls. All are
options to consider if you need to cut back on travel and telecommunications ex-
penses.
Achieving More Efficient Workflow
Reducing paperwork and increasing effective communication were essential business
goals long before the Internet became a household word. An increased sense of being
in a world community joined by network technology, however, has heightened com-
petition and increased pressure on businesses to work efficiently. When workers in
developing nations like India and China are competing for work on a level playing
field, businesspeople in older industrialized nations need to do everything possible to
improve speed and eliminate duplication of efforts. Whether you’re a lone entrepre-
neur or a business manager, you need to be aware of new technologies that can
increase not only profits but also the efficiency of day-to-day administration.
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Free software like Google Docs & Spreadsheets has the potential to change the
way work takes place in offices around the world. Everyone needs to type letters and
reports on their computers, and most businesses need to keep track of financial re-
cords using spreadsheet applications. Since personal computers first gained wide-
spread acceptance in the 1980s, their users have had to download and install software
programs to perform these functions. As new versions of the software are released
with better features, those same individuals need to purchase updates and install
them as well. When new computers are purchased there is often a different operating
system involved, so new versions of the software need to be obtained.
You’re probably quite familiar with the process of making sure you have the disk
space and processing power needed to run the programs you buy. And chances are
you use some version of the most popular business application around, Microsoft
Office. Instead of having to pay hundreds of dollars per user (depending on the
version of Office you typically use) to install or update the program every few years,
Google provides you with a new and exciting alternative: using common applications
by connecting to them online. Google Apps is an example of an approach to deliver-
ing computer programs known either as ‘‘software as a service’’ or ‘‘hosted applica-
tions.’’ Instead of installing a word processing spreadsheet, a calendar, and another
application that will consume disk space on your computer, you use your Web
browser as the interface to those applications. Google Apps has Google poised to
take on Microsoft and directly challenge its dominance in the business productivity
area. You’ll find out more about Google Apps in Chapter 6, and about many of the
components of this suite of applications in subsequent chapters.
Strengthening Your Marketing Pull
By going online with Google, you increase the number of potential customers you
can reach. The Internet gives you access to new leads and markets worldwide. Access
to the Internet is now a necessity, and businesses are performing ever more functions
online. Internet communication technologies such as Web pages, e-mail, bulletin
boards, videoconferencing, and chat can help you find new business partners.
Here’s an example: the Cato Institute, a nonprofit public policy research founda-
tion in Washington, D.C., hosts a variety of public events such as talks and discus-
sions held by well-known figures. Go to the Institute’s Events page (http://
www.cato.org/events/calendar.html), and you can view a list of upcoming talks and
other gatherings. Each of the descriptions shown in Figure 3-1 includes a Google
Calendar button at the bottom (as well as buttons for other popular calendars by
Microsoft and Yahoo!).
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Figure 3-1. Your organization can use Google Calendar to help promote your upcoming events.
Click the Google Calendar button, and your browser jumps to your default calen-
dar space on Google. You open a form that contains automatically entered informa-
tion about the upcoming event and its schedule. Click Options, and you can tell
Google to e-mail you a reminder. In Figure 3-2, I’m specifying that a reminder will be
sent to me 30 minutes before the event takes place.
Does the Google Calendar button attract more attendees to the event? It might,
especially if those attendees are sent automatic reminders so they don’t forget. It’s
also a subtle nudge on the part of the savvy Web business that to attract increasingly
busy professionals, you need to provide them with all the tools they need, and increas-
ingly, that includes Google’s business applications.
Research More Efficiently
Google won’t come out and tell you what to say in your blog or on your Web page.
The general topic is up to you. It might give you some ideas about what to say,
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Figure 3-2. You can tell Google to e-mail you an automatic reminder about your newly scheduled
event.
however, and it can also provide you with some add-ons that will make your site more
worthy of repeat visits.
First, there’s Google’s News service (http://news.google.com, shown in Figure
3-3). At this writing, the site had just released a feature that enables anyone with a
historical question to search news archives for stories going back several decades.
For anyone wanting to answer a question or prepare a more accurate report, such
archives are a gold mine of information.
A variety of other specialty services will save you the time that you would have
spent trudging to the library or making phone calls to research centers:
• Book Search. This service (http://books.google.com) lets you search the full
text of many books.
• Blog Search. If you are trying to gauge current opinions and the ‘‘zeitgeist,’’
try this service. It searches the text of the many online Web logs, otherwise
known as blogs (http://blogsearch.google.com/).
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Figure 3-3. Google’s news service can help back up your business research.
• Finance. This site (http://finance.google.com/finance) specializes in stock re-
ports and business news.
• Patent Search. Search (http://www.google.com/patents) the text of patents to
see who’s in competition with you for that innovative product you’re devel-
oping.
• Specialty Searches. If you’re looking for information limited to a specific topic,
you might find it here (http://www.google.com/options/specialsearches-
.html). You can search through government Web sites as well as those of
Apple or Microsoft.
Streamlining Administrative Functions
Many businesses handle essential administrative tasks such as payroll, training, and
maintenance online. You can avoid expensive purchase orders and cut down on pa-
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perwork by ordering goods from suppliers through Gmail or through Google Apps.
If you set up an account for a trusted supplier, that company’s representative can
send orders directly to your Google Apps workspace by logging in with a password
you issue to them and uploading (a techie term for transferring) the file using Google
Apps’ user-friendly tools. Security is definitely a concern, however. First, Google
protects you in two ways: it restricts access to shared Google Apps workspaces and
you need to guard your passwords and account information closely if you plan to
publish information online that you don’t want the whole world to see. Even if you
or your colleagues do upload information to Google Apps, you have a second level
of protection: you have to specifically share each file with selected individuals; other-
wise, they’ll only be seen by the people who upload them.
Some larger companies convert their entire operations to make use of Internet
technologies like e-mail, file sharing by means of intranets (internal networks that use
Web browsers to give access to information). They order supplies from electronic
catalogs, create vertical portals, set up employee intranets, and more. They spend
millions of dollars installing proprietary software such as Microsoft Exchange, as well
as setting up complex servers to manage information. Google is revolutionizing this
by making the same technologies like shared workspaces, applications like calendars,
spreadsheets, and word processors, available online for free, taking them out of the
province of technical experts and organizations with ‘‘deep pockets’’ and making
them available to everyone.
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P A R T
ⅷII
Using Google to Search
and Be Found
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C H A P T E R ⅷ4
Improving Google Search
Results
When I scan the message boards of services that host Web sites for small businesses,
one of the most common topics is this: ‘‘How do I get my site to show up on
Google?’’ By ‘‘showing up on Google,’’ the site owners mean that they want their
pages to appear near the top of a set of search results. Let’s say that you have created
a site focusing on bird cages, and your site turns up on page 56 of a set of 80 pages
of results. Few, if any, dedicated bird lovers are going to dig that far into a set of
pages. In my experience, you need to get on the first one or two pages to have any
chance that someone will click through to your site and make a purchase. The Holy
Grail for many online businesspeople is a ranking right at the top of the first page of
Google’s search results—or, barring that, to appear somewhere on the first page of
search results.
The practice of optimizing your content to get the best placement in Google’s
search results is so common that it has been given its own name: search engine
optimization (SEO). Google’s exact formula for ranking pages in a set of search
results is a closely guarded secret, but enough of it is known that you can follow
some relatively simple, low-tech practices to improve your page’s rank. The increased
attention that comes from being on page one of a set of Google search results in the
form of Web site visits is both effective and cost-effective. It’s something you can do
yourself for little or no money. But yet it’s among the most important ways in which
Google can help small businesses. Here’s how it works.
A Mathematical Formula for Success
Google’s exact formula for determining search result rankings is a complex algorithm.
It’s partly mathematical, and partly based on many factors that indicate how active
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36 USING GOOGLE TO SEARCH AND BE FOUND
and how popular a site is—in other words, how valuable it is as a resource. Google
continually re-indexes the Web, and ignores sites that are considered ‘‘dead.’’ A
‘‘dead’’ site is one that hasn’t been updated for a long time and that doesn’t receive
many (or any) visits. To avoid ending up ‘‘dead’’ in Internet terms, you need to update
your site regularly by changing some content.
For instance, if you publish a blog online using Google Blogger (see Chapter 13),
you only have to make an entry every week (or better yet, every day) to keep your
site fresh. Otherwise, make a commitment to change something—anything—on your
site every week or so. This can be something as insignificant as the ‘‘last updated’’
date at the bottom of your Web page, or as significant as the page title. One Web site
developer who is related to me explained that every week or two, he goes through his
site page by page and rewrites headings and other text just so his site will be new
when Google does its re-indexing. Just add a bit of information as often as you can
to improve your search results. Of course keeping the cobwebs off your site is a good
practice just to keep your visitors coming back to you on a regular basis.
Search Engine Rankings
The idea behind the desire for favorable search engine placement is probably borne
out by your own experience. The whole point of doing a search on Google is to
obtain a set of search results that you can scan. If you’re like me, your tendency is to
start clicking on links that are near the top of the first page because they are either
most relevant to what you’re looking for or they exactly match what you’re seeking.
Your job as a Web site owner or business marketer is to get your own site as close as
possible to the top of the first page of results when someone does a search for prod-
ucts, services, or topics that match your own.
There are two simple and practical ways you can improve your search engine
ranking: (1) submitting your site for inclusion in Google’s directory and (2) exchang-
ing links with other Web sites.
Tip: There are online businesspeople whose particular goal is to in-
crease their links to other sites. These networks are called Like Ex-
changes. If you want to participate, simply access the Google
Directory: to GoGoogle’s home page (www.google.com), click the link
more, click the link even more in the popup menu that appears, and
when the More Google Products page appears, click Directory. Then
go to this category: Computers Ͼ Internet Ͼ Web Design and Devel-
opment Ͼ Promotion Ͼ Link Popularity Ͼ Reciprocal Links. You’ll
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37IMPROVING GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS
ﬁnd a long list of Web sites that will match you up with ‘‘link part-
ners.’’ Make sure to approach sites that aren’t direct competitors,
but that offer products and services that complement your own.
Playing the Keyword Game
A keyword is a word or phrase that someone enters in the search box provided by
Google or another search service. The user submits the keywords to the site, and a
sophisticated computer program scours a database that the service has compiled. The
database consists of some of the contents of every page on the Web that the search
service’s automated computer program, called a spider, has been able to index. The
exact operations of the spiders, the databases, and the means by which individual
pages and contents are culled from the database are a closely-kept secret. But one
Google employee, Matt Cutts, wrote in 2003 (at http://www.mattcutts.com/blog) that
Google moved from a system in which the database was updated once a month to
once a day.
What does this all mean for you? When you design your Web pages, it’s important
to keep them updated. It’s just as important to sprinkle the keywords your customers
or clients are most likely to enter in prominent locations on your pages. Those loca-
tions include:
• Each page’s title bar. This area at the very top of the browser window is be-
lieved to be indexed by Google: the search program doesn’t scan an entire
Web page but only indicators such as the title that describe its subject or
contents.
• Headings. The headings at the top of your page are important because it’s
believed Google’s automated indexing programs don’t scour the entire con-
tents of Web pages. The theory is that the ones that count are only the biggest
headings (the ones labeled H1 or Heading 1 by the Web editing programs
used to create those pages) and those near the top.
• The first paragraph or two. Most Web sites spell out their ‘‘mission’’ or provide
a summary of their contents at the top of the home page, and this is regarded
as an important location for keywords by those who study search engine opti-
mization.
Tip: Don’t worry about terms like at, is, or, a, or the; these are
ignored by search engines. Focus on nouns and verbs that describe
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your site’s contents. If you need suggestions of keywords that are
related to what you sell or promote on your Web site, do a free search
at Wordtracker (http://www.wordtracker.com). This popular service
(which includes a paid version with many more suggestions) provides
you with a list of likely keywords based on your site’s content. (See
Chapter 5 for more about Wordtracker.)
The words ‘‘Google is believed to . . .’’ are used in the preceding list because, as I
mentioned earlier, Google’s exact formula for making searches relevant and accurate
is secret. However, you get a glimpse into some elements of Google’s method when
you look at Google’s patent application, which it filed with the U.S. Patent and Trade-
mark Office (USPTO) in December 2003. The application contains a list of 63 crite-
ria that will be used in evaluating search ranking. According to the document Google
assigns each page is a numeric figure called a PageRank, which is determined by
factors such as these:
• How frequently the page’s contents are retrieved as a result of search queries.
• The number of new pages that are added to the site, or that are linked to the
page being retrieved.
• The amount of text or photos that are changed on the site.
• The length of time the page has been online.
• The time that passes between changes to the page; the more frequently the
page changes, the higher its PageRank number.
When you take the 63 factors (or at least the ones you can absorb most easily) into
account, you will probably write and design your pages differently than you have
been in order to improve your own page rankings. Make sure your titles aren’t blank
or that they contain a generic word such as Home or About Us. Make sure they have
at least one or two keywords in the visible content of your Web page that describe
who you are and what you do. Both the title and keywords can be controlled in
virtually any Web page editing program. Microsoft’s latest Web editor, Expression
Web, uses the dialog box shown in Figure 4-1 to specify the page’s title. In addition,
you can also add keywords and a brief description to the HTML code for your page.
The keywords and description don’t appear in the body of your Web page that is
actually visible to anyone with a Web browser. It remains in the code, behind the
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Figure 4-1. Take a moment to add keywords to your title in your Web editing software.
scenes, where it can be read by one of those automated ‘‘spider’’ programs that index
your pages. The keywords (in theory) help make your site more visible; the descrip-
tion is incorporated into the brief description that appears when your site is added to
a set of search results. In fact, many Web site owners who pursue SEO techniques to
improve search rankings realize that adding keywords to the Web page code for a
page doesn’t affect rank much, if at all; the factors listed in Google’s patent applica-
tion and elsewhere in this chapter, such as links, updates, page history, and searches,
carry more weight when it comes to page rank.
Besides creating page titles, try to build important keywords into critical areas of
your site, as described elsewhere in this chapter. And make an effort to commit
yourself to a schedule whereby you update your site regularly. Make sure the links
you make to your pages and from your pages to other sites are valid (in other words,
they don’t lead to ‘‘dead’’ or nonexistent pages).
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Tip: The Google PageRank patent application can be found by doing
a search for its application number, 0050071741, USPTO’s Web site
(www.uspto.gov).
Adding Your Site to the Google Directory
Unlike the philosophy that if you pad your essays in creative writing class you’ll get
a better grade, length here is not your friend. If your descriptions are too long, they
won’t fit in the search results. You make sure that what will actually be seen is a
message that you want to get across. Here, control is the name of the game. If you
compose your own description for submission rather than waiting for Google’s spi-
ders to index your site, you can be the one to decide exactly what appears in the
search results. One option is to compose your Web site description jut the way you
want it, and to submit it to the Google Directory.
The Google Directory is a style index to the contents of the Internet. With a style
that is similar to Yahoo!, it is arranged by category. Most people access Google’s
database of Web sites by using its well-known search page, which is also the site’s
home page. To find the Directory, you first need to access the site. Go to the home
page, click More, and click Even More. When the More Google Products page ap-
pears, click Directory under the heading Search.
You can also take advantage of a simple and perhaps more practical approach to
getting your Web site before the eyes of potential visitors: add your URL to the
Google Directory. You do this by accessing Google’s form for submitting a Web page
URL to the directory (http://www.google.com/addurl). The form is shown in Figure
4-2.
You have two options for adding a description to Google’s directory (or Yahoo!’s,
or any other directory, for that matter). You can submit your description to Google
as described in the preceding paragraph. You can also add a description to the HTML
code for your Web pages What does it mean to add your description to the HTML
code? Every Web page consists of a visible set of contents (text, colors, rules, and
images) that appear in a Web browser window, and the underlying markup that tells
a browser how to format a page’s contents. The underlying markup is written in a
language such as HTML (HyperText Markup Language). The HTML code for a page
is a text file formatted with a file extension such as .htm or .html so a browser knows
that it’s a Web page file and that the contents need to be formatted accordingly.
An HTML file consists primarily of commands like this:
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Figure 4-2. Fill out this form and submit it to Google’s directory.
ϽbϾFormat this sentence in bold.Ͻ/bϾ
The ϽbϾ and Ͻ/bϾ commands describe to a browser what is supposed to be
bold. In addition, a markup file can contain text that is not intended to be displayed
in a browser window and that does not appear on a Web page. For instance, you
might see comments left by the page’s author, like this:
Ͻ!--This document was created by Martin Smith using Expression Web 1.0 --Ͼ
Another type of content is bit of META information. Such information is only
meant to be interpreted by a browser or another program (such as an indexing pro-
gram used by Google or another search engine). Some META commands can enclose
keywords associated with your Web page, or a description that tells a search engine
exactly how to describe it. For example:
Ͻmeta name‫’’ס‬description’’ content‫’’ס‬This is a web site devoted to the care
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and feeding of parrots. Our ﬁne feathered friends and their owners will ﬁnd
food and custom toys, and other parrot owners with whom they can discuss
their favorite pets!’’
Whether you embed your Web page in a META command in your page’s HTML
or whether you submit it to Google’s directory, in either case you get a chance to
characterize your site the way you want to present it. You can be businesslike, or you
can be irreverent. Suppose you create a Web site devoted to parrots and parrot toys.
You want your site to be distinguishable from Jimmy Buffet’s Parrot Head fan club,
or any other organizations that use the name Parrots, such as baseball teams. You
can create a description of the site in a set of search results; the description that
appears reads like this:
A Web site intended for parrot lovers. Includes custom-made parrot toys and
houses.
The point is that if you take a proactive approach to search listings, you can
control how your site is described in those results. That way, you’ll get the visitors
who are actually looking for what you have to offer and who are more likely to make
a purchase, send in an inquiry, or perform another action.
It Pays to Be Popular
You’ve heard the saying that more leads to more, and here’s another case in point.
Google’s engine is partial to sites that have frequent updates as well as those that get
lots of hits. Just adding keywords and descriptions to your Web pages won’t necessar-
ily result in a good ranking. Being popular, however, has nothing to do with getting a
date for Saturday night. From the search index program’s point of view, popularity is
defined as a lot of links being made to a page.
No Web site exists in a vacuum. Every site contains hypertext links that lead
visitors from one location on a page to another or to another page, image, or file
somewhere on the Web or even on your own computer network. Google gives a good
page rank to a site that contains lots of valuable, valid links to other sites A valid link
is one that is accurate: the link goes to an actual Web page rather than one that is
‘‘under construction’’ or that has moved because the Web address has changed. A
valuable link is a link to a site that has many other sites pointing to it. It turns out
that on the Web, as in other areas of life, being ‘‘well connected’’ matters. In this
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case, a page that has lots of connections to other pages is seen by Google as vital and
worthy of a prominent place in search results.
One way to improve both the quantity and quality of the links on your Web pages
is to contact other sites and ask them to link to you.
A useful approach is to look for sites that have products and services that comple-
ment yours. You should then approach the owners of those sites and ask to exchange
links: ‘‘I’ll publicize your site if you publicize mine.’’
Selecting Business Content for Google
Not all of the business content you publish online is for public consumption. You
might not want search services like Google to index certain pages. You can block a
search indexing program from including all of your Web pages or just selected ones.
• You include a simple text file named robots.txt.
• Identify the automated program you want to block, or the pages on your site
that you don’t want indexed.
• Post this text file on your Web site. Google itself provides instructions for
people who want to block indexing programs at http://www.google.com/sup-
port/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer‫.26304ס‬
Doing It Yourself: Linking to Your Own Web Sites
Many enterprising businesspeople increase the ‘‘linkage’’ associated with their Web
site by connecting to themselves. They create lots of different Web sites and point
them to one another, creating their own mini-network of interconnected pages. Pub-
lishing a variety of Web site increases the chances someone will find you simply
because you have multiple ‘‘presences’’ online. Having the pages link to one another
or at least point to a primary Web site lifts all of the sites in page rank.
Lars Hundley, who owns the site Clean Air Gardening (http://www.cleanairgarde-
ning) is a real online entrepreneur. One of his Web sites sells environmentally friendly
tools such as manual push-type lawn mowers. But he also has a variety of other Web
sites. As mentioned above, the number of sites that link to your own makes your site
more ‘‘valuable’’ in Google’s eyes, and improves its search placement. Google’s index-
ing programs don’t know whether you are linking to one of your own Web sites or
someone else’s. Enterprising businesspeople like Lars create multiple Web sites. By
linking them to one another, each site appears to Google to be well-connected—in
other words, with plenty of links to other sites. This improves the Google search
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placement for all sites. In addition, Hundley uses blogs and even the photo-sharing
site Flickr to promote his business. His sites include:
• Practical Environmentalist (www.practicalenvironmentalist.com)
• Gardening Gift Guide (www.gardeninggiftguide.com), a blog for gardening
products that frequently links to and promotes products for sale on Hundley’s
primary site, Clean Air Gardening.
• Compost Guide (http://compostguide.com/info).
• Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/cleanairgardening). Hundley posts pho-
tos of satisfied customers happily pushing his lawn mowers or using other
tools they have purchased from him on this site. The Flickr page contains a
link back to Clean Air Gardening.
The best way to get a good ranking on Google, however, has nothing to do with links,
keywords, and titles: it’s simply to have a good Web site. The more valuable your site
is and the more frequently you maintain it, the better its rank will be. That’s the
genius of Google’s search system: it rewards good behavior with good attention.
Sure there are quite a few non-technical and low-cost strategies you can pursue to
improve your search ranking on Google. But no single activity will function as a
‘‘cure all’’ to take your Web site from the 50th page of a set of search results to the
coveted Page 1 position. You have to try all of these different activities, and keep at
it on a regular basis. In the next chapter, you’ll learn another way in which rolling up
your sleeves and trying some new marketing strategies can pay off for you: by initiat-
ing some AdWords paid search campaigns that will gain more attention for your site
in an efficient way.
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C H A P T E R ⅷ5
Improving Your Visibility
with AdWords
Google first became popular and eventually gained widespread acceptance for two
reasons: its search service delivers what it promises, and it’s free. But Google, like
any business, couldn’t give away its services for free indefinitely. Rather than charging
a fixed fee for conducting searches, however, Google made a fortune by coming up
with an innovative advertising system called AdWords.
AdWords takes advantage of Google’s search technology for delivering context
sensitive ads: ads that match the item that someone is searching for. AdWords en-
ables Google to convert its search service to a revenue-generating system, while at
the same time giving anyone the opportunity to set their own fee for displaying the
ads. The cost-per-click payment system used by Google has largely supplanted the
old-fashioned banner advertising system in which Web publishers displayed fixed ads
on their pages and were paid based on the number of times those ads are viewed.
This chapter provides you with a brief introduction to Google’s main advertising tool
and how you can get started with it to attract more attention for your business.
Understanding AdWords
AdWords (http://adwords.google.com) is the program that comes up with context-
sensitive advertisements that appear just above and to the right of search results on
Google. It gives everyone from lone individuals to big corporations the chance to
compete in a level playing field for the same valuable advertising space. Because
Google is the most popular search service around, and because millions of people
conduct searches on Google every day, its search results pages are viewed by many.
And if you can create an ad that will offer products or services that are similar to, if
not identical to, what they’re already searching for, it’s worth paying for those ads.
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An example is shown in Figure 5-1. I’ve conducted a search for a brand of shoes
I frequently sell on eBay: Allen Edmonds. The natural search results—the results
generated by Google through the mysterious formulas described in Chapter 4—are
presented in the main area of the page on the bottom left. You’ll notice that Allen
Edmonds’ own Web site appears right at the top of the list, followed by links to stores
that sell this manufacturer’s shoes. Some of the AdWords ads appear on the right;
others appear at the top.
It’s interesting to notice that none of the AdWords ads shown in Figure 5-1 direct
the shopper to the Allen Edmonds Web site itself, although this manufacturer does
sell its shoes online through its Web site. Instead, the AdWords ads you see on the
first page lead shoppers to the e-commerce Web sites of various companies that sell
shoes. The manufacturer could place an ad for its own products if it wanted to; on
the other hand, since it appears right at the top of page one, it might not be necessary.
Who places the AdWords ads seen in Figure 5-1, if they aren’t the manufacturer
of the shoes? The AdWords advertisers fall into two general categories:
• Online retailers. Lots of stores sell shoes on the Web, and these store owners
want to drive customers looking for shoes to their Web sites. When you’re
looking for shoes, for instance, you’ll see plenty of AdWords ads for Zappos
.com, an online shoe store.
Figure 5-1. AdWords ads appear alongside natural search results.
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47IMPROVING YOUR VISIBILITY WITH ADWORDS
• Affiliate advertisers. An affiliate is someone who places an ad on behalf of an
advertiser. The affiliate promotes the advertiser’s products and services and
steers potential customers to the advertiser’s Web site; the affiliate pays a fee
every time someone clicks on an AdWords ad. But the affiliate earns a far
larger fee if one of the shoppers ends up making a purchase or performing a
specific action, such as registering for the site or submitting information.
Affiliate advertising is a multifaceted subject that could easily require a book of its
own. But it’s something you can pursue through Google. Often, Internet-based com-
panies like the job search site Monster.com and the bookstore Amazon.com run their
own affiliate programs. You sign up with them, you place an ad on your Web site,
and you earn a fee if someone registers, places an ad, or makes a purchase (the
criteria depends on the advertiser). But the number of clickthroughs (clicks on your
ad that take a visitor to the advertiser’s Web site) your ad receives depends on the
visibility of your Web page. The more visitors you receive, the more ad revenue you’ll
generate. If you place your affiliate ad on one of Google’s search results pages, you’ll
probably receive a lot more attention than you would otherwise.
You can use AdWords, then, as either an affiliate or as an online merchant adver-
tising your own business. Affiliate advertising is an activity that can be very lucrative,
and one that has made a few enterprising individuals rich. I’m only going to discuss
it briefly at the end of this chapter, however. For the bulk of this chapter, I’m going
to assume you’re a businessperson who wants to advertise your own Web site or
online store by placing AdWords ads on your own behalf.
Does AdWords Make Sense for Your Business?
Suppose you’ve taken steps such as those described in Chapter 4 and optimized your
Web site so it will receive prominent placement in Google’s search results as well as
services like Yahoo! and MSN Search. Should you take the next step and pay for ads
that appear alongside the natural search results? It’s not an either-or thing: competi-
tion is becoming so fierce among e-commerce Web sites that most businesspeople
optimize their sites for search placement and take out AdWords ads as well. Of
course, you could also consider one of the other tried-and-true advertising options
like these:
• Paying for directory placement. Yahoo!, one of the most popular directories to
the Internet, now charges commercial entities several hundred dollars to list
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themselves in the directory at http://www.yahoo.com. But simply being in-
cluded in the directory can get you more attention. (Google, of course, has
its own directory at dir.google.com. You don’t have to pay to add your URL
to Google’s directory; see Chapter 4 for more.)
• Banner ads. A banner ad is an image, usually rectangular in shape, that is
displayed on someone else’s Web page. You are the advertiser, and you pay
the publisher of the site a fee for showing your ad. The fee varies depending
on the publisher: you might pay on a CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) basis.
Or you might pay only when someone performs a desired action, such as
clicking on the ad to go to your Web site, or making a purchase after clicking
on the ad.
The problem with directory searches is that your site is listed alongside many others
that offer similar items or services. The problem with banner ads is that they aren’t
always targeted: you can’t always control what Web surfers are looking for when they
come to a site. They may or may not be interested in the substance of your ad. And
if you agree to a CPM payment structure, you are at the mercy of the publisher: if
the publisher attracts many thousands of visitors due to a special promotion, it will
hopefully end up with more visits for you, but whether you get visits or not, you still
pay for that ad.
One of the big advantages of AdWords is that you are in control. You can begin
or end ad campaigns at any time. Not only that, but you can determine how much
you will pay every time someone clicks on your ads: you can bid as little as a penny
a click or as much as $10. It’s not a good idea to bid as little as a penny, however,
because you are competing with anyone else who has already set a price-per-click
level on the same keywords. If you bid a penny and someone else has bid .10, that
person will get higher ad placement in a set of search results for your specified key-
words. The challenge is to bid as low as possible while still ensuring placement near
the top of the page; bid too high, and you’ll spend too much on your ads. Bid too
low, and few people will ever see your ad. And the success of your ad also depends
in large measure on how you write it. You have an agonizingly small space in which
to create your ad. Count the number of characters in one of the ads that appear on a
set of Google search results, and you get the idea: the typical ad consists of only two
lines of 30 to 35 characters each.
Another advantage is targeting: your AdWords ads only appear in search results
when someone enters a keyword or phrase that matches a keyword that you associate
with the ad. For instance, suppose I am advertising a line of golf gloves I have re-
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49IMPROVING YOUR VISIBILITY WITH ADWORDS
ceived in bulk from a wholesale supplier and want to sell quickly. I create the Ad-
Words ad shown in Figure 5-2.
After creating the visible part of the ad (the part shown in the preceding figure),
Google gives me the opportunity to choose keywords to associate with my ad. These
are words or short phrases that consumers are likely to search for when they are
looking for my gloves such as:
Figure 5-2. AdWords ads have keywords associated with them that you specify.
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• Gloves
• Golf wear
• Golf accessories
• Men’s golf gloves
• Women’s golf gloves
Google will display my ad when someone’s search terms match one of my keywords:
But where the ad is displayed depends on how much I want to pay for each one of
those keywords. I might bid, say, ten cents on the keyword ‘‘gloves.’’ That means
every time someone clicks my ad after searching for the keyword ‘‘gloves,’’ I pay 10
cents. If someone else has bid 15 cents or 20 cents for the same keyword, their ad
appears above mine in the search results pages. The important thing is that I deter-
mine how much I am willing to pay, and I only pay when I get results—when someone
clicks on my ad. I can also adjust my ad copy and bid amounts based on performance;
a keyword that gets a lot of results for me might be worthy of a higher bid amount,
while one that doesn’t attract any clicks can be reduced or deleted at any time.
Creating Your AdWords Campaign
If you have already signed up for another Google service such as Gmail, you can use
the same username and password when you sign up for AdWords. But you have to
associate your existing Google Account with AdWords before you can use it.
Signing Up for AdWords
It’s free to sign up for AdWords, and the program itself is free to use—you only pay
cost-per-click fees for the ads you create. Before you get started, you should have at
least a rough idea of what you want to advertise and what keywords are typically used
by Google searchers to locate products or services like yours. Do some searching on
Google for your own products and see which keywords work; also check out the
AdWords ads that have already been created for products like yours. It’s not a good
idea to copy them outright—you want to get more attention for your own ads than
your competitors do—but you might get some suggestions for keywords and phrases
you can insert into your ad text.
1. When you’re ready, go to the AdWords page (http://adwords.google.com), log
in if necessary, and click the [Begin] button.
PAGE 50................. 16736$ $CH5 11-30-07 14:56:30 PS

Go Google 20 Ways to Reach More Customers

Go Google 20 Ways to Reach More Customers

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Go Google 20 Ways to Reach More Customers